McLaughlin's "Birds of Fire"

Playing Technique
#1

Hi Troy, hi everyone,

this is the intro arp of “Birds of fire” from Mahavishnu orchestra’s second album:

I have no big problems with crosspicking but in this case, due to the string skipping, i play the recurring 5 notes Down-Up-Up-Down-Up…
Can you play it with straight alternate? Is it worth it to work on my technique to modify my pattern?
Can string tracking change the rules we have come up about on cross picking?
Unfortunately, there are no videos that i know where we can see John playing it (Troy please don’t forget to ask John to play this if and when you’ll have the chance to interview him!)

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#2

This screams hybrid picking to me!

EDIT: I mean, that is the way I would play it (why work so hard?), probably John is picking everything!

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#3

I’ve always wanted to know this as well about “Birds of Fire.” I can’t find any live clips either, but similar odd meter arpeggio shows up in the song “Meeting of the Spirits,” and I found some good footage of John playing it. Maybe this could give us some insight into his approach to playing these sorts of passages.

Here’s the clip. The arpeggio comes in around the 0:57 mark:

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#4

Great post, Montreal543!!
Well, it seems to me that John is using a lightly supinated arm with a 902 movement, and, i’m not sure, it seems that he always hit the low E with a downstroke, so he’s not really using alternate picking (similar to the way i play Birds of fire)…
So the question is, when there’s so much string skipping is strict alternate picking compromised?
In this circumstances, string tracking become the first problem, so i think the next frontier that Troy must reach with his investigation must be to get a better understanding of how string tracking is achieved and to get some rules about it, IMHO.

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#5

Well, to develop a useful technique or as a framework for developing sub-components of technique… But yeah for performance, definitely screams more than alternate picking, and Montreal’s arp video seems to bear that out in McLaughlin’s playing. (And I always enjoy closeups of a Minimoog being played in this kind of context :slight_smile: )

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#6

Good eye! I would agree with this.

The low string always looks like downstrokes to me. Specifically, any time there is a string skip it looks like D-D. Everything else looks like alternate picking. It just so happens that this coincides with the odd-numbered groupings which is how he keeps it downstroke-only on the low string.

There is some forearm movement here, so he’s not doing the “wrist-only” version of this movement, but rather the Andy Wood “occasional forearm” approach. This is in keeping with everything else we’ve seen from John in the various clips of him we’ve looked at, like here:

https://troygrady.com/seminars/antigravity/chapter-21-john-mclaughlin/

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#7

A thought on lines like this: If you’re playing a repeating pattern with an odd number of notes, particularly a rhythm/backing part that you want to sound consistent, repeating pickstrokes to keep the picking pattern from switching may help with making it sound right. I.e., the repeated downstrokes may not be purely mechanical at all, but rather a timing thing.

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#8

Sorry @ItAllanLover to hijack your thread with all this “Meeting of the Spirits” material (since your original post was about “Birds of Fire”!), but for those interested, here’s some tablature for the arpeggio in the clip I posted earlier.

image
99F9D6AF-A85D-4D50-8859-85AEC5C8CB24.png1276×1650 130 KB

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#9

So he is staying true to the subdivision going DUDUD then repeat kind of doing DUD triplets then repeating I guess

#10

Thanks Troy! How would you play it? Strict alternate or John’s way?

#11

Thank u for the tab, Montreal543! :slight_smile:

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#12

So technically speaking, Mclaughlin is crosspicking?

#13

No idea, haven’t played this piece. Are you asking what is possible? Technically speaking there is no reason why pure alternate can’t work, and obviously John’s way works. My advice is always to use whichever way works best for you, right now, at this moment.

#14

The movements generally look like the 902 “family” of movements referenced above. But short of hooking him up to an EMG machine to know what muscles are firing it’s always an educated guess of course.

#15

When I was an aspiring teenage guitarist, I watched McLaughlin play this live on three different occasions, from a very close vantage point. I remember being shocked because he was clearly playing these arpeggios D-D-U-D-U all the way through. (In my naïvete back then, it somehow struck me as “illegal”.) He made it look so offhandedly effortless! So of course after the first time, I locked myself in my room and proceeded to practice this about a million times with the record. I was surprised that it was much easier to play that way, rather than the way I’d been doing it, which had been strict alternate picking. Of course, all that said, after having been playing for all these decades, I always tell students to experiment with every manner of picking possible, then use the one that works best for you at that time, and at your particular stage of development. Easy!

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#16

Nice picking exercise is also the opening riff of the song “Celestial Terrestial Commuters” from the Mahavishnu Orchestra album Birds of Fire. I have found 2 different approaches to be most practical and fluent to me at my present skill level:

  1. with the strings 2, 3 (open all the time), 4: UDU UDU UDU UDU
  2. with the strings 1 and 3: UDU UDU UDU UDU (the first of very group of three UDUs being an open 3rd string)
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#17

I am also prety sure he uses down-down-up-down-up for the Meeting of the Spirirs. The high note is always an upstroke.

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#18

I had that same experience man!

#19

Oh, I spent a good deal of my youth trying to play this and the Meeting of The Spirits arps with strict alternate, because I thought that was how John played it. I did manage to get it to a descent speed, maybe even close to the recording version-but nowhere near the speeds they were playing it live, some versions are insane…Later I tried the DDUDU way which worked much better for me, and so it was exciting to discover that that’s how actually the man played it. I believe that’s how he generally deals with this type of arpeggio riffs, like the ones already mentioned and also Guardian Angel and the like.
Having said that, whenever I play this or other similar tunes these days, I too go hybrid.

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#20

Here’s what I got from the Meeting Of The Spirits video earlier - I’ll explain by using the string # first, then the fret # (Example: 62 = 6th String 2nd Fret | 44 = 4th string 4th fret | 30 = 3rd string open, etc.) So, here’s what I got, in 3 variations:

Var. 1: 62 44 22 34 10 - 62 44 22 34 10 22 34 | 63 44 22 34 10 - 63 44 22 34 10 22 34

Var. 2: 62 44 22 30 10 - 62 44 22 30 10 30 44 | 63 44 22 34 10 - 63 44 22 34 10 22 34

Var. 3: 62 44 22 34 10 - 62 44 22 34 10 34 44 | 63 44 22 34 10 - 63 44 22 34 10 34 44
It all amounts to the same pattern John McLaughlin uses: D D U D U - D D U D U D U

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